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jueves, 16 de octubre de 2014

Even though the story is extremely abstract, describing a quasi-archetypal
situation, it is also extremely concrete,
attempting to capture the visual and aural surface of a situation, of the
dialogue in particular.

Try to reconstruct a dialogue from your own
life, the dialogue of a quarrel or a dialogue of love. The most precious, the
most important situations are utterly gone. Their abstract sense remains (I
took this point of view, he took that one, I was aggressive, he was defensive),
perhaps a detail or two, but the acousticovisual concreteness of the situation
in all its continuity is lost.

And not only is lost but we do not even wonder
at this loss. We are resigned to losing the concreteness of the present. We immediately
transform the present moment into its abstraction. We need only recount an
episode we experienced a few hours ago: the dialogue contracts to a brief
summary, the setting to a few general features. This applies to even the
strongest memories, which affect the mind deeply, like a trauma: we are so
dazzled by their potency that we don’t realize how schematic and meager their
content it.

When we study, discuss, analyze a reality, we
analyze it as it appears in our mind, in our memory. We know reality only in
the past tense. We do not know it as it is in the present, in the moment when
it’s happening, when it is. The
present moment is unlike the memory of it.
Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of
forgetting.

We can assiduously keep a diary and note every
event. Rereading the entries one day, we will se that
they cannot evoke a single concrete image. And still worse: that the
imagination is unable to help our memory along and reconstruct what has been
forgotten. The present – the concreteness of the present – as a phenomenon to
consider, as a structure, is for us
an unknown planet; so we can neither
hold on to it in our memory nor reconstruct it through imagination. We die
without knowing what we have lived.